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CounterPunch
January
8, 2003
The Price of Oil?...War
By RITT GOLDSTEIN
As troops and equipment pour into the Gulf for
a looming war with Iraq, United States military thinkers admit
that "defence" means protecting the circumstances of
"daily life" - and in the US daily life runs on cheap
oil.
As far back as 1975, Henry Kissinger,
then secretary of state, said America was prepared to wage war
over oil. Separate plans advocating US conquest of Saudi oilfields
were published in the '70s. So it should come as little surprise
that in May last year - four months before the terrorist attacks
on Washington and New York - a battle plan for Afghanistan was
already being reviewed by the US Command that would carry it
out after September 11. Military strategists were highlighting
the energy wealth of the Caspian Sea and Central Asia and its
importance to America's "security".
The Indian media and Jane's Intelligence
Review reported that the US was fighting covert battles against
the Taliban, months before the "war on terrorism" was
declared.
General William Kernan, commander-in-chief
of the US Joint Forces Command, let the revelation about the
battle plan review casually drop in July while extolling the
success of America's Millennium Challenge war games to Agence
France-Presse.
Earlier, during the northern spring last
year, Michael Klare, an international security expert and author
of Resource Wars, said the military had increasingly come to
"define resource security as their primary mission".
Over several months beginning in April
last year a series of military and governmental policy documents
was released that sought to legitimise the use of US military
force in the pursuit of oil and gas.
Simultaneously, the energy task force
of the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, was working to tackle a looming
US oil crisis. Reflecting a shifting strategic policy, the influential
Council on Foreign Relations urged that the Defence Department
be included in Cheney's energy group.
During that spring of 2001, as the US
military examined the all-out battle scenario that would soon
become the operational plan for the war in Afghanistan, events
fatefully spun towards September 11's trigger. But these events
did not occur in a vacuum.
Providing a summary of the US military's
coming role, over the summer of 2000 the Army War College (a
foundry for the US military's strategic thinking) published a
declaration that security "is more than protecting the country
from external threats; security includes economic security".
The policy statement appeared in an article
by Lieutenant-Colonel P. H. Liotta, professor of national security
affairs at the Naval War College, one of a handful of present
US national security gurus.
His article went on to advocate the use
of military force "for more than simply protecting a nation
and its people from traditional threat-based challenges".
Colonel Liotta argued that defence meant protecting the US lifestyle,
the circumstances of "daily life".
Reflecting the relationship between pronouncements
by such policy gurus and Washington's actual policies, in the
Journal of Homeland Security of August this year, Colonel Liotta
said America "will practise pre-emption against those who
seek to harm our vital interests and our way of life".
At the end of September President Bush
unveiled a national security strategy of pre-emption.
And so the months preceding September
11 saw a shifting of the US military's focus. Publications of
the US Army War College and the army General and Command Staff
College argued that, when it came to oil and gas, "where
US business goes, US national interests follow". They highlighted
the energy wealth of Central Asia and its importance to America's
"security". Oil and gas were on the military's agenda.
Cutting to the crux of present-day issues,
a spring 2001 article by Jeffrey Record in the War College's
journal, Parameters, argued the legitimacy of "shooting
in the Persian Gulf on behalf of lower gas prices".
Mr Record, a former staff member of the
Senate armed services committee (and an apparent favourite of
the Council on Foreign Relations), also advocated the acceptability
of presidential subterfuge in the promotion of a conflict. Mr
Record explicitly urged painting over the US's actual reasons
for warfare with a nobly high-minded veneer, seeing such as a
necessity for mobilising public support for a conflict.
Amplifying the impact of the military
papers, in a document commissioned early in the Bush presidency,
two key US policy groups, the Council on Foreign Relations and
the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, explicitly
advocated a convergence of military and energy issues.
Their joint report - Strategic Energy
Policy Challenges for the 21st Century - aproved of "military
intervention" to secure energy supplies. It also urged Pentagon
participation in Mr Cheney's energy task force. And the report
warned that the US was running out of oil, with a painful end
to cheap fuel already in sight.
Virtually concurrent with the report's
release on April 10 last year, Tommy Franks, commander of US
forces responsible for the Persian Gulf/South Asia area, added
his voice.
An April 13 report on his congressional
testimony defined General Franks's command's key mission as "access
to [the region's] energy resources". That May it was his
command that reviewed the soon-to-be-used details for the coming
war in Afghanistan.
Also early last year, the security expert
Michael Klare warned that US military action to secure oil "could
emerge as the favoured response to future [oil] crises".
In the months preceding September 11, US governmental and military
policymakers increasingly built military frameworks around energy
questions.
Iraq has 10 per cent of the world's proven
oil reserves, with The New York Times reporting in October that
the Bush White House is planning for the installation of a US
military government there in the event of a war leading to the
overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In a parallel with Afghanistan,
US covert action has reportedly already begun.
Ritt Goldstein
can be reached at: ritt1997@hotmail.com
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